Category: western-front
Quotes of Category: western-front
Birds of the Western FrontYour mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hoverabove the shelling. They don't turn a featherwhen hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth,flickering star-shellsand flares from the Revelation of St John.You look awayfrom artillery lobbing roar and suck and snapagainst one corner of a thicketto the partridge of the war zonemaking its nest in shattered clods. History floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You clingto the hard dry stars of observation.How you survive. They were all at it:Orchids of the Crimeanature notes from the trenchleaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldronwith souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath - for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch flashed like mediaeval glass.You replace gangrene and gas maskwith a dream of alchemy: language of the birds translating human earth to abstract and divine. While machine-guntracery gutted that stricken wood you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro through splintered branches, breaking buds and never a green bough left. Hundreds lay in there wounded. If any, you say, spotted one bird they may have wondered why a thing with wings would stay in such a place.She must have, sure, had chicksshe was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert.Like roots clutching at air you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawnsounding insincere above the burning bush: plough-landlatticed like folds of brainwith shell-ravines where nothing stirs but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice sliding across your faces every night. Where every elixir's gone wrongyou hold to what you know.A little nature study. A solitary magpie blue and white spearing a strand of willow.One for sorrow. One for Babylon,Ninevah and Northern France,for mice and desolation, the burgeonin warwestern-front
